I was commiserating with a left-handed friend over his hatred of gel-style pens as he has the problem of smudging ink when his hand passes over the words he’d just written. We started talking about Di Vinci (who wrote, I believe, right to left, to avoid this problem) but then started thinking about languages and ancient scribes smudging their manuscripts and, eventually, trying to find a list on Old Man Internet noting which languages were written which way but failed at finding anything approaching comprehensive.
Any linguists out there? Which languages go left to right; which go right to left; which are bi-directional; vertical; unspecified? I’d be curious for any info, including both dead and live languages and their systems.
Actually, in some situations, Japanese is occasionally written right to left in horizontal lines. For instance, when there is writing on a vehicle, the text goes from front to back, so that on one side it’s right-to-left and on the other left-to-right. Similarly, yatai stands have front-to-back writing. Notice how the first character is repeated on the corner.
Interesting. They don’t seem to do that in Chinese, at least not around here. They DO do it with flags. Although our flag is symmetrical about the vertical axis, so it doesn’t make a difference.
Older stores (pre-“post war”) also used to right-to-left on signs on the front of the stores.
I’ve heard, but cannot cite, the explanation is that right-to-left, horizontal writing is a special case of right-to-left, vertical with only one character per line.
I can’t recall ever seeing blocks of text right-to-left, horizontal.
Like TokyoPlayer wrote, it used to be used on store signs. Temple signs, books and newspaper titles as well as occasionally calligraphy (when written horizontally) was also that way, in Japan and China alike. It has only survived in Japan because of the somewhat bizarre rule of writing front-to-back. Note that this is only for single-line text.
a slight hijack question but why is arabic written right to left? it seems odd since the left hand is taboo in those kind of cultures and i can see a lot of smearing happening if you write using your right hand
Egyptian hieroglyphs were written left to right, right to left (you can tell which by the direction the bird hieroglyphs face) and top to bottom but never bottom to top. Often the choice was an aesthetic one and you can find examples of the same text mirrored on either side of a doorway.
Similarly to this (and as a slight hijack), some ancient texts (but only very archaic ones for Greek and Latin) used Boustrophedon: A zig-zag writing style in which left-to-right and right-to-left lines alternate. The funny thing is that with a few minutes of practice, you can read that quite fluently and without problems - the Wiki site has a sample of Boustrophedon in English. I have even heard claims that it’s a very efficient style with which you can reach higher reading speeds, because the eye doesn’t have to jump back to the beginning of the next line after finishing the previous one.
For Chinese, smearing is a non-issue, because the traditional way of writing Chinese is with a soft brush and water based ink, held straight up vertically, with the hand not touching the medium at all. Picture below:
Pencils, ballpoint pens and other writing implements that require one to apply pressure to the writing surface is a relatively new development.
I understand traditional Arabic calligraphy IS written with a hard reed pen. I watched a few videos of people doing it and it looks like they avoid the issue by holding the paper at a slight angle to the left, so that the right hand is always resting below the line being written. I notice some left handers write English in the same way.
